Because I see these mountains they are brought low,
Because I drink these waters they are bitter,
Because I tread these black rocks they are barren,
Because I have found these islands they are lost;
Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world
My shadow has fallen.
I remember the very first time that I ever landed at Isle Ornsay, and the first time that I was aware of the place other than as a lighthouse, twenty-four years ago as I write now. I had bought the Island of Soay and was preparing to start there the shark fishing industry which I believed would solve the problems of the island’s small and isolated community. The factory, with its pier and slipway for hauling by steampower ten-ton carcasses on to a flensing yard like that of a whaling station, its oil-extraction units and fish meal plants and glue tanks, its salting vats and laboratory and all the other costly follies, consisted still of plans on paper; and in those days, at the war’s end, all kinds of equipment were difficult or impossible to come by. I landed at Isle Ornsay village from my little thirty-foot lobster boat, the Gannet, that gallant little craft that after the Island of Soay Shark Fisheries Ltd became fact rather than fantasy was the most successful harpoon-gun boat of them all, and killed nearly two hundred sharks of almost her own length. Isle Ornsay was a dead place by then, a few scattered cottages, the mansion house ruined and nettle-grown, the pier in need of repair; there was little enough to tell a visitor that this had once been a prosperous place; indeed I did not know myself that it had been a great port crowded with ships, the industrial centre of Skye and all the adjacent mainland coast.
Soon after I had landed, my predatory eye was caught by a large rusty hand winch standing near the head of the pier. I went over and examined it; it was intact though obviously in long disuse, and a little probing with a knife showed that the rust was not too deep for the winch to be restored as a functional item. At Soay I should need many winches, large and small, ranging from huge steam-riven things to little toys like this one. I looked around me for some sign of human life, and saw a middle-aged man in tattered oilskins sitting on the ground with his back against a wall. He was smoking a pipe and eyeing me with some curiosity; strange visitors to Isle Ornsay must have been a great rarity in those days of fuel restrictions and disrupted communications.
I went over to him and asked him if he knew to whom the winch belonged. He looked me up and down speculatively, with-ut moving or taking the pipe from his mouth. Clearly I presented a problem; though I was dressed in a torn seaman’s jersey and dirty old canvas trousers and had several days’ stubble on my face, my voice must have told him that I wasn’t a fisherman as he understood the term. Few West Highlanders will ever give a direct reply to a question as it is first put to them, any more than an Arab merchant will give the final price of his wares on first demand. Fact is something to be approached circuitously or tangentially, to go straight to the heart of the matter would be clumsy and unrefined. In this case my question about the winch had anyway to be subsidiary to his own as yet unspoken question as to my identity. So he looked me up and down from untidy head to shabby, patched rubber-booted toe and back up again, and then said, ‘You’ll be a scrap merchant?’
I said I wasn’t a scrap merchant. I didn’t want to elaborate, to tell him that I was the man who had bought Soay and whose projects for it had been widely reported in the newspapers, because if he chanced to be the owner of the winch this knowledge would send the price soaring. So I said I just happened to need a winch like this one, and could he tell me who it belonged to. After a long pause, and with patent mistrust, he replied, ‘There hasn’t been a scrap man here for a long time. There’s some old iron lying near the beach in Camuscross down there, but I couldn’t rightly say who owns it. It’s been there as long as I can remember– t it wouldn’t be easy to shift. The half of it’s bedded down in that black mud, and you couldn’t get your boat in there except at high springs, and then the iron would be under water. Ay, it would be a problem right enough.’
I gave up, and wandered away to explore the ruins of the mansion house. Early seventeenth century, I thought, with later additions; it must once have been magnificent, with a high-walled garden stretching away behind it, and a real curiosity of a lavatory – beautiful little stone structure built on the rocks directly above the sea, so that no drainage system was necessary.
Unfortunately I found, among the nettles that flanked the old gateway to the mansion house, a pile of lorry tyres – nother thing that it was difficult to obtain in those days, and which I badly needed as boat fenders for the big Stornaway drifter I had bought, the Dove. With resolution but not without misgiving I went back to the man with the pipe, who watched my approach out of the corner of his eye, without turning his head. I asked, diffident but defiant, about the tyres. He took his pipe from his mouth and looked me straight in the eye. At length he said:
‘It is a scrap merchant you will be.’ This time it was an order, not a statement; it sounded like an army directive.
I left Isle Ornsay empty-handed; the winch and the tyres were still there, in exactly the same positions, when I bought Isle Ornsay Lighthouse cottage just twenty years later. But by then the winch was rusted away, and I had no use for the tyres.
7
Kyleakin Lighthouse
We went next to inspect Kyleakin Lighthouse, in the same splendid summer weather of cumulus clouds and calm seas; up the cliff coast and past Glenelg village on our starboard side, on into the narrows at Kylerhea where the spring tides run at nine knots, past the mouth of Loch Duich and into Loch Alsh. Only at two points does the Island of Skye almost touch the mainland of Scotland, at Kylerhea and at Kyleakin, and Kyleakin is very much the narrower of the two channels. Here a chain of shaggy, heathery islands reaches out from the mainland, so that the last and highest of them, on whose rocks the lighthouse was built, almost closes the channel, leaving less than three hundred yards of water between it and a high rocky promontory of Skye where Kyleakin House stands upon the summit sheltered by a crown of trees.
We came up Loch Alsh leaving Kyle on the starboard side, dodged between the crossing ferry boats, and came in slowly to the southern side of the island, where between steep rocks there was a bay at the foot of the slope. Here a runway on the beach had been cleared of boulders, and at its shoreward end a small shed for an outboard engine showed pale against the dark heather. We anchored the Polar Star clear of the tide’s current and rowed the dinghy ashore.
Every new island or islet upon which I have ever landed for the first time holds a mystery of its own, a feeling of discovery that is some small echo of the wonder and anticipation with which the early navigators set foot upon greater unknown shores.
The lighthouse itself is an imposing structure, seventy feet high, and connected to the mass of the island by a bridge. From the bridge a steep path leads up to where the joined cottages are perched high on the south-east-facing slope of the island.
Edal and Teko. ‘We walked the two otters along the beach and about the field, always at a respectful distance from each other.’
‘He and Teko regarded each other as natural playmates, Dirk making rings of dazzling speed around the otter.’
Gavin and Edal. ‘She quickly became deeply affectionate and demonstrative.’
The shoreline.
Jimmy and the greylag geese.
Terry and Teko
‘Teko at that time was a weighty ball of very soft dark brown fur and fat and bonhomie.’
The Polar Star–‘As with so many other “bargains” she required an enormous amount of expenditure before at last she became both trustworthy and socially presentable.’
Isle Ornsay – The lighthouse, the cottage and the walled garden, all dazzlingly whitewashed, stood on a small, rocky, tidal islet.’
‘The beaches at Camusfeàrna are a treasure house for any man whose eye finds wealth at the sea’s edge.’
The Kyleakin lighthous
e on Eilean Ban –‘The lighthouse itself is an imposing structure, seventy feet high and connected to the mass of the island by a bridge.’
‘At Kyleakin I felt as if I were coming home.’
Deeply though I had been impressed by Isle Ornsay, I felt drawn to Kyleakin as I had to few places in my life – and this despite its nearness to the summer tourist scene. I have since tried to analyse this feeling of profound attraction; at first I thought it might be due to nothing more complex than the fact that Camusfeàrna, with all its echoes of past unhappiness and loss, was out of sight. But I think now that it was a far call back to childhood, for the long, rough heather, the briars and the outcrops of bare rock might have been those surrounding The House of Elrig where I was born, the house that obsessed my childhood and adolescence and came to represent for me the only refuge in a frightening and unfamiliar world. The land surrounding Elrig was a wilderness in which the close-cropped green turf of Isle Ornsay would have found no place, but at Kyleakin I felt as if I were coming home. It was here, I decided, that I would live if ever I left Camusfeàrna.
Even in the early years after the war, when I first came to live at Camusfeàrna, both Kyleakin on Skye and Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland shore – from which the mail for our district used to arrive by a thirty-foot motor launch in every wind and weather – were very quiet little places, and seemed to retain much of an earlier flavour. Though the crossing was the only car ferry to Skye (for the Glenelg–Kylerhea ferry was not renewed until 1963, and the Mallaig–Armadale service carrying many cars at a time did not come into being until 1965) there was little tourist traffic, and correspondingly few shops and hotels. Those that there were had for the most part a modest, old-world atmosphere; in Kyle of Lochalsh, for example, the Pioneer Stores – which is now a sort of miniature Marks and Spencers, essentially of this decade – was a dim little premises run by two elderly ladies, and it smelled of Harris tweed and tallow and such homely things; it had an indefinable personality of its own, like the Post Office in Glenelg, which sold cheese as well as postage stamps. The Marine Stores, less massively equipped than it is today, had a sort of nostalgic quality crystallized for me by a pair of bellows which I bought there in 1952. Bellows were a necessity at Camusfeàrna, and I had none. There seemed to be only one pair in the Marine Stores, and they were, I remember, hanging from the ceiling; they were sturdily constructed of beechwood and leather, and ornamented with brass studs. When I asked how much they were the proprietor unhooked them from the ceiling and looked for a price-tag. An expression of mild surprise crossed his face as he saw what was plainly written on the smooth white board of one side – four shillings. ‘Four shillings,’ he said; ‘that’s pre-war stock left over from the good old days. It takes a thing like that to remind one what they were like.’
If one drove from Camusfeàrna to Kyle, a distance of almost forty miles by roads that were then entirely single tracked, one would meet hardly another vehicle, even in summer, and if one did it would be, as often as not, a local car or a lorry carrying sheep or Forestry Commission timber. Just when all this changed, just when Skye and the mainland coastline became a great summer holiday resort thronged with cars and caravans I find it impossible to remember accurately, but now that stretch of road – mercifully widened for at least a small section of its length – often carries a nose-to-tail procession of cars for miles on end, and the Kyle sea frontage has been modified to contain vast car parks for tourists awaiting their turn on the ferry. (Before these were constructed the queue of stationary vehicles would occasionally stretch for a quarter of a mile or more inland.) New shops and new hotels had sprung up at Kyleakin to deal with new demands, and though it is still a small fishing port, with the emphasis upon prawns and lobsters, the atmosphere in summer is that of a village geared primarily to touristic requirements.
But the lighthouse island was untouched by these changes, and it seemed to me an enchanted place. I bought both lighthouses in October 1963. In the Deed of Sale of Ornsay I was curious to notice a specific clause excluding mineral rights in the land purchased. I knew that the rocks were of hornblende schist, and contained large garnets and other crystals, but that was not the reason for the clause; a far more precious metal underlies that rock. There was no mention of anything invisible at Kyleakin.
Before describing in detail the ghosts that seem indisputably to haunt Kyleakin Lighthouse island they must be shown in perspective, separated from the great host of their more dubious and debatable relations common to the whole area of the West Highlands and Islands.
Superstitions of every kind – witches, the evil-eye, omens, mermaids, fairies, kelpies (water horses), sacred waters, trees and stones – were at the very core of the Skye man’s life. There were propitious days to begin a task (Monday was the most favourable) and disastrous days (Saturday was the worst). All action had if possible to follow the sun’s course, and a boat putting to sea would initially row sunwise no matter what its real destination. Fishermen would ensure a heavy catch of herring by walking three times sunwise round a sacred stone. Crops were planted and harvested by the phases of the moon – the sowing on the wax and the reaping on the wane. A waxing moon was held to communicate power of growth, so that sheep-shearing, and even a human haircut, could only take place during this phase. Anything that must dry, such as wood, peat, hay or corn, was cut only on a waning moon, so that it could not be re-vitalized by the moon’s strength.
Among the old people, and not a few of the younger, the world of the ‘supernatural’ is accepted as unquestioningly as the ‘natural’. Until very recently the belief in witches was universal. A witch could take the form of an animal at will, usually that of a hare or a cat, but sometimes horses, cows, or even whales, and whereas she could be killed only by a silver bullet any injury inflicted upon her while in animal shape left corresponding marks when she resumed her human identity. A hare would be shot at and wounded, and the next day some old woman would be found to have gunshot wounds in her legs or arms.
Many of these stories from the district are very detailed; these are samples. A Kyleakin man was troubled by a cat that consistently raided his kitchen. He succeeded at last in catching it, and cut off one of its ears; soon afterwards it was discovered that a local woman had lost an ear, and for the rest of her life she had to wear a shawl over her head to hide her shame.
A fishing family suffered from the attentions of a small whale that constantly tore their nets and freed the fish. At length one of the boat’s crew armed himself with a sharpened three-pronged potato fork and hurled this at the whale as its back showed passing the boat. The whale sounded and did not reappear. The next day a woman, already believed to be a witch, died in great agony, calling down curses upon the name of the fisherman. An examination of her dead body showed three terrible wounds in her side, corresponding to the prongs of the fork. The whale was never seen again.
Kelpies were held to inhabit many lochs; they waylaid maidens by night and carried them down into the cold deep, so that they were seen no more. Loch na Beiste (Loch of the Beast) at Kyleakin is said to contain a creature that some describe as having a head covered with a mane, while others who claim to have seen it refuse utterly to give any description whatsoever. Two fishermen in a rowing boat were almost submerged by an unknown animal which they described as about twenty feet long, as thick as a man’s thigh, and with a maned neck. The carcass of some apparently unknown creature with a mane is said to have been found in the Boom Defence Net off Camusfeàrna Lighthouse island during the Second World War, but no scientist ever examined it, and it remains a story.
The mermaids of Skye, called in Gaelic Maighdean Mara (sea maiden) or Maighdean na Tuinne (maiden of the waves), seem to be less frustrating to the male sex than the rest of their kind; instead of remaining fish from the waist down they become wholly human after their capture. A Skye man caught one in his nets and took her home. She shed her tail at once, and, delighted with this cooperative metamorphosis, he hid it in the raf
ters of the barn, and made the most of what had replaced it. She lived with him many years, and bore him children. At length one of these, playing in the barn, chanced upon the tail, and came running to his mother to ask what it was. ‘It’s my tail!’ she cried in wild delight, ‘my long lost tail!’ and without a backward look she hurried down to the sea with it and was never seen again.
Most Skye men would laugh at such stories now, but I think there are few who would deny absolutely the existence of ‘second sight’, whose possessor is able, often most unwillingly, to see into the future – not all the future, but isolated happenings usually of a calamitous nature. A possessor of this ability is feared, but also fears his or her own powers, so that a ritual of exorcism was devised; at the very first vision the seer must recount all that he saw to an intimate friend who meanwhile holds a Bible before his face and turns the pages rapidly. However open a mind one may try to keep as to the possibility of ‘second sight’, the credibility of this as a remedy must rank with the mermaid’s tail.